Alice Isabel Hazeltine

“ For, as the story hour unfolds a new world to the listener whose life has been bounded by a litter- covered alley and three bare walls, or whose look into the outside world has been perhaps a roof of tar and gravel and a yawning chasm beyond, so the development of the imagination through the right sort of books shall make possible the fullest development of the individual boy and girl. In many a life there has been a supreme moment when some circumstance, some stimulus has changed that life for good or ill. For want of that stimulus, the dormant power of many a man has gone to waste. ”

“ Visitors come into the room and say to such a person, "How can you stand this for many minutes at a time?" and the librarian looks round in surprise at the idea of there being anything hard to bear when she hears only the little buzz that means to her hundreds of little ones at the most susceptible age, eagerly, happily absorbing the ennobling ideals, the poetic fancies, the craving for knowledge that are going to make them better men and women than they would have been without this glimpse into the realms beyond their daily surroundings. ”

“ The dropping of a book or overturning of a chair, the walking about do not disturb the young student's train of thought; and while I do not wish to be quoted as advocating a noisy room, but on the contrary would work for a quiet one, day in and day out, I do feel that allowances must be made for noises that are not intended to be annoying, and that we should not sacrifice to the ideal of deathly stillness the good we hope to do through the child's love for the room in which he feels free to express himself in a natural, friendly atmosphere. ”

“ I said awhile ago that the new education has had a tendency to make life too soft for children, and to give to their parents the belief that natural instincts alone are safe guides to follow in rearing a child. I hope I shall not seem to be a good old times croaker, sighing for the days when school gardens and folk dancing and glee clubs and dramatization of lessons and beautiful text-books and fascinating handicraft and a hundred other delightful things were undreamed-of ways of making pleasant the paths of learning. ”

“ The Jewish, the Italian, and even the Polish mother gains confidence in us, tells us all the family details—and feels finally that we are fit persons to whom she may entrust her children.
Probably our most attractive-looking child is the Italian, a swarthy-skinned little creature, with softly curved cheeks, liquid brown eyes and seraphic expression—that seraphic expression which is so convincing and withal so misleading. Child of the sun that he is, his greatest ambition in life is to lie undisturbed in the heat of the day and so be content. ”

“ They browse among the shelves lovingly, and instinctively read the best we have to offer. Tales from the ancient Hebrews, history, travel —these are the books they take. But what they read most gladly is biography. It is just as difficult to find a life of Lincoln on the shelves as it is to find an Altsheler—and of comparisons is that not the strongest? Heroes of all sorts attract the Jewish child, heroes in battles, statesmen and leaders in adventure, conquest, business. If a hero is also a martyr, their delight knows no bounds. ”

“ And this is their faith—that the power of the world springs from the common labor and strife and conquest of the countless age of human life and struggle; that not for a few was that labor and that struggle, but for all. And the common labor of the race for the common good and the common joy will bring that fulness of life which sordid greed and blighting ignorance would make impossible. ”

“ Let us suppose that the momentous problem is solved of persuading children to use the library for more serious purpose than to find a book "as good as 'Mark the match boy,' " and that we are trying to convince children that the library is infallible, and can furnish information on whatever they wish to know about—whether it is some boy who comes on the busiest morning of the week, to find out how to make a puppet show in time to give an afternoon exhibition, or some high-school girl who rushes over in the 20 minutes' recess to write an exhaustive treatise on women's colleges. ”

“ Even we librarians claim for our public collection no such fine service as is rendered by those private treasures that stand on a person's own shelves, round which "our pastime and our happiness will grow." Books for casual entertainment are more and more easily come by. But so far as our imagination reaches, what private library will for most readers supplant a public collection of books for purposes of study and reference? Is it not then fitting that we spend time and effort to educate young people to the use of the public library? ”

“ May we not, as if it were a new idea, rouse to the seriousness of the mediocre habit indulged in by young people capable of better things? Should not our work with children reach out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? ”

“ Often the mischievous mood is of short duration, the attention is arrested by something in one of the books before him, and suddenly, your noisy boy is transformed into a studious youth. It is a great satisfaction to know that while the small child is in the library, he is not only safe from the evil influences of the street but is deriving a double benefit—the enjoyment of the book that absorbs him for the time being, and the habit of reading that is unconsciously being formed. ”

“ But there are many parents in large cities and in manufacturing towns, who cannot be induced to visit libraries and see for themselves as Leopold's mother did, and they are frequently averse to having their children go to a place they know nothing about, believing that they are being drawn away from their school tasks by the mere reading of story books. How is it possible to stimulate their curiosity and interest to the point of making a Library seem desirable and even necessary in the education of their children to become citizens and wage earners? ”

“ What are the essentials in children's books if your selection must be small? Our children can grow up without Henty. They must not grow up without the classics in myth and fable and legend, the books which have delighted grown people and adults for generations, and upon the child's early acquaintance with which depends his keen enjoyment of much of his later reading, because of the wealth of allusion which will be lost to him if he has not read aesop and King Arthur and the Wonder Book, Gulliver, Crusoe, Siegfried and many others of like company, in childhood. ”

“ But the young patrons of the library ought not to be encouraged in confining their reading to juveniles, of no matter how good quality. It is the one great evil of this era of juvenile books, good and bad, that by supplying mental food in the form fit for mere children, they postpone the attainment of a taste for the strong meat of real literature; and the public library ought to be influential in exalting this real literature and keeping it before the people, stemming with it the current of trash which is so eagerly welcomed because it is new or because it is interesting. ”

“ Let a child who lives in a cramped little flat where one can hardly set foot down without stepping on a baby come into a wide, lofty, spacious room set apart for children's reading, and, other conditions in the library being as they should the mere effect of the unwonted spaciousness will impress him and have a tendency to check the behavior that goes with tenement- house conditions. We of the profession are so impressed with the atmosphere that should pervade a library, that a very small and unpretentious collection of books brings our voices involuntarily to the proper library pitch. ”

“ It is good for the American child to learn just a little of the old fashioned "children should be seen and not heard" advice, to learn at least a trifle of consideration for his elders by restraining his voice and his heels and his motions within the library, saving his muscles for the wildest exercise he pleases out of doors. The separate children's room is too apt to become a place for so persistently "tending" the child that he loses the idea of a library atmosphere which is one of the lessons of the place he should NOT miss. ”

“ Poverty in all but spirit and mind. The great leveler to them is education, and it is no uncommon thing for the Jewish father to sacrifice himself in order to better his son, to take upon himself that greatest of sacrifices, daily grind and deprivation. Not only this generation, but the one before and the one before that. They cannot keep up such a white-hot search for learning without sooner or later finding out what is wisdom—real wisdom. Stripped of all but bare necessities, they come to possess a sense of value that is remarkably true. ”

“ Without the elbow-room that some kinds of fun require, without money to buy games, without leisure to play them or to teach them to their children, forever held down by drudgery, forever pressed upon by the serious hand-to-hand fight to keep the wolf from the door, is it strange that the poor know next to nothing of the commonest home games and diversions? ”

“ When one realizes that these books reach a total of 200,000 volumes, that they are sent to people living in scattered communities strung shoe-string fashion high along mountain ridges—back and apart from civilization— to a people of rugged character, demanding strength in books as in life, capable of appreciating strength, one sees what a stupendous opportunity for community uplift has been wasted, and one stands aghast at the folly, economic and intellectual, of the limitations imposed. Why should children alone be considered? ”

“ Seldom does a week pass without a crowd of children coming to us petitioning for the use of one of the club rooms. Often these clubs are of short duration, but some of them have been in existence for years. Sometimes they are literary, sometimes purely social—but more often dramatic. In the dramatic club the children, starved for the brighter things of life—can pretend to their hearts' content, and their keen imagination can make it all vividly realistic for them. They choose their own plays, draw the parts, make their costumes and carry out their own conception of the different roles. ”

“ The library must supplement the influence of the schools, of the home, and of the church; with some children it must even take the place of these other influences, and on its own account it must be a source of pleasure and an intellectual stimulus. If it is to accomplish all or any great part of this, not only for one, but for thousands of children, what serious thought and labor must go to its accomplishment! The children's librarian stands very close to the mother and the teacher in the power she can wield over the lives of the little ones. ”

“ That is, they give false views of life, making it consist, if it be worth living, of a series of adventures, hair-breadth escapes; encounters with tyrannical schoolmasters and unnatural parents; sea voyages in which the green hand commands a ship and defeats a mutiny out of sheer smartness; rides on runaway locomotives, strokes of good luck, and a persistent turning up of things just when they are wanted —all of which is calculated in the long run to lead away the young imagination and impart discontent with the common lot of an uneventful life. ”

“ I would have liked in this over-lengthy, but yet fragmentary survey of the field from the viewpoint of the library, to say something of the mistakes which have perhaps been made, and which may still be made unguardedly by reason of over-zeal whereby the relationship of the work to other things may be ignored or misunderstood; of the danger that over-strong consciousness as to possession of high ideals may dictate too urgent use of books that may have literary style, but do not reach the heart of the boy—driving him to the comic supplement and to the dregs of print for his reading hours. ”

“ It is so unnatural for a roomful of healthy boys and girls to be absolutely quiet for long periods that if I found such a state of affairs I should be sure something was wrong—that all spontaneity was being repressed, that that freedom of the shelves which is a great educator was being denied because moving about makes too much noise, that the question and answer and comment which mark the friendly understanding between librarian and child, and which make a good book circulate because one boy tells another that it is good, were done away with in order that no slight noise might be heard. ”

“ A severe punishment is to forbid the boys a 'story hour.' They love this and will not miss an evening unless compelled to remain away. To give some of the worst boys a share in the responsibility of caring for the room often creates a feeling of ownership which is wholesome. Our devices are as numerous and unique as the boys themselves. Some of them would seem absurd to an outsider. The unexpected always happens; firmness, sympathy and ingenuity are the virtues required and occasionally the added dignity of a policeman, who makes himself quite conspicuous, once in a while. ”

“ The best managed libraries nowadays are those wherein warnings are conspicuous for their absence. Next to the officious human "dragon" that guards its portals, there is probably no one feature in all the great libraries of a western metropolis that causes so much caustic comment and rebellious criticism as that of an immense placard in its main reading room bearing in gigantic letters the command, SILENCE—this perpetual affront being found in a great reference library frequented only by scholarly patrons. ”

“ Without identifying itself with any of the movements such as the kindergarten, child-study, and social settlement, without losing control of itself and resigning itself to any outside guidance, the children's library should still absorb what is to its purpose in the work of all these agencies. "This one thing I do," the librarian may have to keep reminding herself, to keep from being drawn off into other issues, but by standing a little apart she may see what is to her advantage without being sucked in by the draft as some enthusiastic movement sweeps by. Must she have no enthusiasm? ”

“ During the scant quarter century which has seen the birth and marvelous growth of modern library work with children, the "new education" has been putting its stamp upon the youth of America and upon the ideas of their parents regarding the upbringing of children. And it has come to pass that one must be very bold to venture to brush off the dust of disuse from certain old saws and educational truisms, such as "All play and no work make Jack a mere toy," "No gains without pains," "We learn to do by doing," "Train up a child in the way he should go," and so on. ”

“ You will readily see, therefore, that in order to select a new library it is necessary to have forty or fifty approved and unassigned books to choose from, and never is a set made up with its fairy tales, pictures of sweet domestic life, stories of adventure, simple history and biography, short stories, long stories, fact and fancy, humor and pathos—never is a set made up, preliminary to starting out upon its first visit, without my mouth watering to read them all myself. ”

“ I believe it is possible to establish a standard of conduct in a public library, which a young person will feel and know if he is not within that standard. It can not be done in a week nor a month. I hope we have one here now. I mean by that also that a librarian can leave the library and not feel that any advantage is going to be taken of an assistant because she is not there. I do not believe in a librarian popping in any time during her off hours making the young people feel she is ready to spring upon them at unexpected moments. ”

“ If there is on the library staff an assistant well read and well educated, broad- minded, tactful, with common sense and judgment, attractive to children in manner and person, possessed, in short, of all desirable qualities, she should be taken from wherever she is, put into the children's library, and paid enough to keep her there. There is no more important work in the building, no more delicate, critical work than that with children, no work that pays so well in immediate as well as in far-off results. ”